Worship Conversations - John MacArthur (E2)

first time i heard that i said that could not have been written today that could not that is far too clear a testimony to the doctrine of divine election welcome to worship conversations with hymns of grace and we're excited today to have a very special guest pastor john is here with us i want to ask you some questions about worship music congregational songs and i've never asked you these questions before but i've observed a lot of it and one of the first things that i've observed i've had to sing before you preach for over 30 years now i've had to recover from your great singing and just be a standing talking head after you brought the house down well i've observed something over the years and i'll give you a an example i remember once we were doing a radio rally in probably in montreal or somewhere in quebec and at these events usually i would sing twice in the service and as it would happen the local speakers always seem to go over there a lot of time and your time would be cut into and like many other times i would get done singing and i would come and sit down next to you and i'd look at my watch and i would say to you i don't need to sing again you can just go preach and every time i said that to you you always said to me no you sing i quit asking you because you always gave me the same answer i cannot say that for many other preachers i've been around and i never ask you why so i guess the question i have for you is as a preacher how important is the congregational singing the special music how does it impact your own heart and your own preparation for worship as you preach and how important do you see that and what would you say to up and coming pastors about that well it might seem like a strange answer but i don't find anywhere in the psalms where it tells somebody to preach but over and over and over and over it tells people to sing music is a gift from god music memorable tunes embedded with divine truth are memorable and we don't forget them we remember the truth because we remember the tune and and music is is something god has given to his people there don't seem to have been sermons in the temple but there was an awful lot of music there was a choir there were instrumentalists i'm not saying there wasn't some reading of scripture there was but the high high high priority of music as a means of worship is unmistakable in the psalms i mean you can't explain them why there are 150 of them and that's virtually almost three times more than any other book in the old testament i mean isaiah has 66 chapters but why so much singing because music is one way corporately we affirm divine truth and it becomes memorable to us you would understand this because i'm sure it's true in your life i am rarely awake without a song in my head do you have that experience yes but it i i would like to get them out of my head because it's usually one i have to memorize and i'm but yeah i'm seeing him in our home right from the time we get up in the morning the first thing we do is turn on hymns turn on christian music it it just circulates in our minds all the glorious truths we love so i would never diminish the place of music if i know that it's a means of ministry rather than some form of entertainment or just to buy time and i know your heart and i know the music you sing ministers the truth of god in the way that god has designed music to do that so i also know that it's a whole lot easier for somebody to listen to four minutes of you singing than four more minutes of me talking just to be practical well it always struck me that you did not view the music as any type of competition or costing you anything as the preacher and i i know there are some out there who view it as hey let's get the music out of the way so i can get to me no but but here's something that i have thought about you never preach you just sing you've told me that many times not to preach well look this is the deal if you don't preach i won't sing you've told me that many times too i did never preach did i oh you didn't okay well i was if you had plenty to say there were times when i've heard you give testimony you know some of the more informal times like when you sing it to our staff meetings and things you you you have so much to say because your theology i mean you've been taught for three or so decades here at grace church and your your heart is overflowing with truth so but but i um i mean i'm saying that in a kidding way but i i remember uh as a kid having to endure my dad's ministry soloists who thought their primary job was to speak and not sing right and my dad cultivated in me a deal that you should remind them that if they don't preach you won't sing yeah i i remember you telling me that many times i mean i was just so afraid of uh you know i'm i'm not a singer who wants to perform i'm more concerned about doing a good job and getting off the stage with my reputation intact is what i'm worried about so yeah there's a there's a measure of humility you know our good friend jubilant sykes almost feels embarrassed when he sings and he's in a he sings with all his heart as you do and then he kind of puts his head down and hurries yes i know what that's like yeah and i don't like the applause no i know he's the same way i just don't like it i feel like ah i i don't deserve it and i don't i told my son once when i was booed in an opera i said if i listen to the booze then i have to listen to the applause so i don't want to listen to either but i think people need a way to say amen and um clapping you know they're we're called to do that clap your hands um i think we have to sort of give people the benefit of the doubt and say this is a joyful thank you rather than a polite expected opera clap right and i i see that in our church particularly these days in the covid thing these people are so giddy when i just walk up to the pulpit they clap they're so excited to meet and it's shown up in the singing too right i mean that's just we have all these new people thousands of new people coming to our church because their churches have been closed and they've never sung like this and they're they're just exuberant with with music so it it meets a design that god has and it meets a great need in the heart well in that answer you also mentioned a little bit about your own home and you had teenagers and you had children growing up in your home you talked about plain hymns what type of music did you have in the home how did you cultivate in your children an understanding for christian music for singing truth and how did you deal with the with the influence of worldly music it was a different world when our kids were growing up so there were no cell phones there were no ipads there were no alexas you didn't have your own world of music to create right so none of our kids ever had a radio in their rooms none of them ever had a cd player in their rooms because we mom and dad were going to decide what the most edifying god-honoring and elevating music was going to be it wasn't all christian music but it was all good music it was all honorable music it was beautiful music you know clayton urb who you know with me 40-plus years always said everybody understands beauty everybody understands beauty right and beautiful music was always what we wanted our children to hear and of course the the most beautiful and redeeming music is the music of the church that honors the lord so so we basically control that and i think that's that's a challenge for parents now because kids can create their own playlists and they can listen to whatever and you may not ever know what they're listening to but i think it needs to be monitored i i also think it's it's not just that you're trying to keep away bad stuff you're trying to keep elevating them musically i mean there's trashy low level music that isn't necessarily immoral it's just not elevating it needs to be music the lord deserves the best i think about that when our orchestra trots out here and you've got 40 people playing strings that all play in the local philharmonic orchestra and this music is so exalted so lofty requires 20 years of training to even play this right that is what the lord deserves i mean we want to give him the best we've got and if all we've got is a you know a weak voice and a little off key we still sing for his glory but we need to feature the very very best and that's what the psalmist says about playing skillfully so that that's part of it we wanted our kids to appreciate quality did you take your kids to the hollywood bowl to hear the symphony did you do did you expose them to even classical works yes yeah well classical music i've always loved classical music and semi-classical music in addition to church music and uh when our kids were little contemporary christian music didn't much exist we were still singing out of the hymnal uh there were choruses some of them pretty good some of them pretty bad but but there wasn't like a genre of contemporary christian music that sounded exactly like rock world rock me and look i i go back to a name that you would know ralph carmichael right ralph carmichael was a pretty good musician he did arrangements for pop singers and orchestras on the secular side he was the first guy that ever introduced a rock a christian rock opera to the church and i knew ralph and he said this is going to revolutionize christian music and it did there were there were a couple of rock operas and and they they wouldn't seem like rock today but they were very very different than anything the church had ever experienced and so this introduced into the church a whole new genre of music that now has basically run hymns out of the church and i i was disturbed at the time i kind of could see where this was going there were some early rock singers that i knew like larry norman there's a name out of the past um and they were they were long-haired hippie types and they they sang the same style of music that was in the world and this was this was an invasion that has been very successful some of it has value but much of it um is geared purely to the visceral part of a person the emotional part stimulating them physically has very little theological redeeming value so yeah it was an invasion that the church would would do well to understand as having pushed out the the greater music it can't push it all out because some hymns are just so good they won't die right right was that difficult at that time to you know through the 70s when that sort of explosion of music happened and and changed our perception of what christian music is and you're right in many ways it it forced the hymns to the side was that a difficult time to pastor and shepherd the church and lead the musicians through that sort of change it was a bit of a battle we had a young music minister here then who was further on that side than i would have wanted we brought him in because we had an older minister of music who was so far into the past that he was oblivious to the present right so the step was made in that direction and it didn't work because our people and myself we wouldn't you know i was young then it was my 30s but we wouldn't let go of the great music it didn't seem to me that you could have great theology serious bible exposition and frivolous music i can i can basically pretty much tell the depth of the theology of a church by the music that they're happy with it doesn't mean that a small church is going to have you know gifted instrumentalists and people who play orchestra instruments and all they may have a guitar they it may be simpler but their theology is going to come out in the kind of music they choose even if it's contemporary it's not going to be frivolous so for me it was a battle to protect the legacy you know one of the things that came along with this music was the pragmatic movement in the church that wanted the church to look more like the world feel more like the world so that non-believers would be comfortable and hymns were so obtuse to unbelievers that they needed to be jettisoned because they people couldn't identify with them i had the very opposite notion my idea was we don't want our church to seem new we want our church to hold on to what is precious and what is traditional and what is old so i think even today we're still singing hymns that i sang as a kid the best of those hymns that we've sung throughout all the 53 years that i've been at grace church obviously there's much good new music that's come along and been added to that portfolio and that shows up in hymns of grace and the work that you're doing but i didn't want ever to feel like this was some one-off church some isolated island which contained all you needed to know i wanted to hold tightly to the great historic theology which meant i wanted to hold tightly to the historic hymnology too well that's certainly been the case here and thinking of that i don't know if you remember what hymnal you grew up with i kind of remember mine when it was i grew up with the all-american church hymnal the red one that was by smith and it had like a brick oh do you remember what hymnal you grew up with no but i think it was smith that he was that great big huge guy and i know him well because he came to our house to visit one time and sat on the arm of the couch and broke it [Laughter] but no all i remember him i grew up with hymna was maroon yes that was it that was it that was it when and it didn't it had a lot of the gospel hymns in it right wasn't big on some of the hymns that made their way out of the reformation some of the older no because reformed theology didn't didn't have its great revival it didn't have its resurgence in the 70s [Music] evangelicalism was still pretty homogeneous and it was sort of gospel messages right and christian life messages and there wasn't a lot of exposition right there wasn't a lot of doctrinal preaching uh when i started to do bible exposition in the 70s with the theological emphasis uh it was it was rare it was it was unusual but at that same time uh j.i packer landed and wrote knowing god right and wrote evangelism and the sovereignty of god and published by university press and people were awakened to reform theology and and then there appeared this guy from pittsburgh doing videos named rc sprole and uh all of a sudden and then jim boyce showed up and all this great resurgence of reformed theology brought back reformed hymns that's right and and that we were singing about the nuances of the doctrine of justification and the nature of god and and then you know along came others like bob coughlin and the gettys and they started writing out of that same rubric of sound reform theology and that has been a profound blessing but it was necessary because when you have reformed theology you have to sing it you can't sing bad doctrine you can't sing you know jesus loves me this i know while you're thinking deeply about the nature of god you you got to go somewhere deeper than that so there was a requirement for the recovery of deep rich hymnology to accommodate this this amazing resurgence in in sound reformed theology well it's it's always great to hear your thoughts about singing about hymns i remember once we were standing in the back during the shepherds conference and we were singing as a congregation uh matt boswell and matt papa's song come behold the wondrous mystery and we'd sing a line and you'd lean over to me eagle that's a great line i remember the one line see the true and better adam come to save the hellbound man so good and you leaned over that's a great line and i and i said to you it'll be in the hymn though it'll be in the hymnal but you're right those new ones the thing about them sure they have singable melodies sure they're musical and they're they're they're tunes that we can catch on and replicate very easily but you're right the theology is much deeper it's saying something how many people think about that phrase the true and better adam and know theologically what that means yeah well you have to you can't sing that if you don't get theology you you sounds ridiculous the um the hymn that we started singing a lot he will hold me fast right first time i heard that i said that could not have been written today that could not that is far too clear a testimony to the doctrine of divine election and i found out that the tunes were written today but the lyrics were written in 1800 right and and we we sing that with gusto because we believe that we're not going to lose our salvation right you right you've got to have a hymn that that articulates your doctrine right and i i remember another one along that line that caught your attention was when the hymn before the throne of god above came out same thing yes old words right old words yeah which for songwriters that's a good way to take note of writing something substantial is look at some of the old texts and look at some of the old poetry that contains theology poetry there's a novel idea okay i love good poetry i i struggle with hymns that don't rhyme that's true it's hard to sing him yeah because they're harder to remember yeah they can get repetitious um yeah i love i love to sing great poetry and that's where it starts like william cooper you know you're singing his poetry i mean it's just the best of the best and wesley was an incredible poet um but an incredible poet so if you were to recommend to a young pastor to read some poetry would you read would you read watts would you read ann steele henry lyon i would start i would start with i think isaac watts salter okay i have one of the early copies of it as a gift right i keep it by my bed this is just genius poetry because what he's doing is he's turning every psalm into a poem right i mean they're jewish hebrew poems but he transposes them all into english and they rhyme right and there's a there's a genius you know as a pastor i've my whole life people have given me bad poems they give me bad art and bad poems but when you find good poetry and a great place to start to love poetry would be to to buy a modern edition of watts salter and just read the poems you also could get an old um you could get an old um british psalter right there's a number of those hymnals where the tunes are only noted by a letter or a number they're not laid out and all you're doing is reading the poetry and it's it's it's just profound and rich i have a 1929 scotty salter that's only about this big but the two the paper is cut in half the bottom half of the pages are the words the poetry the top half are the tunes and you can turn each half separately and match wow almost any tune up with the poetry yeah and they did that they said they sang the poetry to different tunes right right yeah no i i think a refined person a really educated person is somebody who appreciates poetry i mean you can start with great poetry and you come down to to modern poetry and i if you're looking for a modern poet who is brilliant and rich it's john piper john piper has written some of the most incredible poetry a good place to start would be to realize that he took the entire book of job and wrote it into a poem wow it's absolutely brilliant part of being refined in your ability to handle language is to appreciate poetry well as as the pastor of a congregation and as someone who's also trying to model um congregational worship what is it like for you on sunday morning you said on the front front pew here you're not someone who ignores the congregational singing you're actively involved there i've seen many pastors over the years there don't come out to the congregational is over or they are looking over their notes how do you feel and how when you walk out here and you participate in the services um are you thinking about your sermon are you thinking about no no i'm not thinking about my sermon i have to have thought about that before because i want to be lost in wonder love and praise so when i first came to grace church the first sunday they had the typical baptist thrones in the chapel up on the front right on the front of the posts right and i said i'm not sitting on that throne i'm going to sit on the front row with my wife and my family and i want to worship the lord and then i'll walk up here and they said oh you can't do that we've never had anybody do that and i remember that we got rid of the throne chairs until clayton erb came to be minister of music the first sunday he was here he said we need those throne chairs back up i said i'm not putting those thrones up there and i'm not sitting there i need to worship the lord and sing with with all my heart and patricia and i stand together with a hymnal and that's um that's the part of the service that that i i love the most and i i don't want to walk the last thing i want to do is walk out of some door to preach i i don't i don't care if if i'm in a conference somewhere somewhere else in the world if i don't even understand the language i will always be there from the beginning of that service to participate in that to to to worship with the people if i'm going to speak i'm i i can't i'm not a helicopter preacher you can't just fly me in and drop me in a pulpit i need to be in the flow of what the lord is doing even as the people worship that's great stuff i i appreciate you saying all of that do you like to say harmony right well i'll i'll sing when you're on the front whatever's simple when you're on the front row do you saying harmony or melody well i sing harmony and melody i'll do one verse in the melody and then i'll do the next verse in the tenor then i'll do the next verse at the baseline you've got a bass voice well yeah i i i read the notes and so i sing okay a lot of hymns i know the bass part without a hymnal so yeah then i usually i start with that you know just unison sing the melody then i usually sing the bass line or the tenor line and then i switch to the other one and then the final verse i pull out the stops and sing the melody we need to have you miked up that's what we need to do we need to like they do with a football team well i am mike thompson we need to turn it on while you're on the front pew so we can hear you sing too well listen we appreciate the time i know i've never asked you some of these questions and i know people are a bit curious um [Music] it just has been such a privilege to to minister together so many years and i i quit asking you if you wanted me not to sing anymore because i figured you thought you weren't getting your money's worth out of me and so that i needed to sing twice and sing before it's not the truth that's not and you know i love you and i have a great affection for you and yes and you minister to people with such rare talent but such a great heart so i'm i'm always here having to follow great music to preach and so there's a challenge in that but i think the people know um in grace church that the music is not just some kind of emotional prep for preaching it is in itself a true expression of worship amen and they can shift from that experience in worship to hearing the word of god as another means by which they they worship in spirit and in truth right that's well said thank you so much it's wonderful that you could do this thanks phil thank you [Music] and i don't think people get steve sterz now what uh the guy is as good as there is in the world on the organ he there aren't many organists left people when we talk about that he's been here 40 some years and who's next yeah yeah i mean yeah the guy with a guitar yeah well thank you very much i appreciate it um thank you phil is that it that's it that's it for us okay so much you're all wonderfully helpful thank you thanks that's another issue we didn't talk about but people don't know how to sing parts because the only thing they've ever seen their whole life is words yeah they all know how to read music feel free to sit back down and talk about

Channel: Hymns of Grace

Views: 18,354

Keywords: worshipconversations, graceproductions, hymnsofgrace

Id: shImpKeljuw

Length: 30min 13sec (1813 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021